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20 Learnings, Notes and Highlights from Day 1 of the Dublin Tech Summit

Lots of talks. Queues. Take Away food. Pens and paper. Business Cards. I think’s. & “What a Time to be Alive”.

It was the Dublin Tech Summit.

Here are some selected notes, tweets and highlights.

Matthew Luhn, a 20 year Pixar Story Veteran showed that storytelling with your business or product isn’t just an emotional thing. Done well, it is calculated and formulaic.

1. Don’t just tell a story. Mix it with facts and information

“When you tell information with a story wrapped around it people remember it”.

2. Remind people of the present situation:

“Great speakers and great leaders use the same techniques by going from the ordinary world to what things could be back to the ordinary world.”

“When [Steve Jobs] introduced the iPhone for the first time, he did this back-and-forth impacting the audience thing, sharing with them that he has something super extraordinary and takes you down and says ‘but every Smartphone that’s been created is stupid'”.

3. Given humans’ attention:

“The hook is the most important part of any story, says Luhn and the audience has to be drawn into the story from the first eight seconds”.

4. One of the few non-Anglo-saxon speakers to take hold of the stage was, Bressie Lee from Withinlink.

Her talk was titled “From Copied In China To Created In China”. One of my first insights was “copying is profitable”.

As I have spoken to others about before, any startup idea which gets pitched anywhere in the world will always have a competitor somewhere else doing it. So why not skip the pain of searching?

5. Look to research articles for startup ideas:

Bressie showed how one startup has created a water monitoring device for kids based on nearly half of all kids being near to dehydrated during school times.

Quoting a Harvard Business Review study in their promo video, it highlighted that a whole startup can be based on one piece of research if we started looking.

6. Open-source is the new innovation.

One great example of open-source innovation is Xioami, the smartphone creator. They have opened up their whole development to those interested, and seem to be gaining in terms of exposure and creative output.

7. Wondering what world problems to tackle?

Not to worry.

Chris Fabian of UNICEF outlined the biggest 5 world problems they are tackling and encouraging others to do to:

Urbanisation – 70% of the world’s population will end up in cities

Migration – there are 50 million children on the move right now

Climate Change – enough said

Disenfranchised Youth – the skills we’re teaching aren’t up to date

Pandemics – given a much more connected world

8. A friend once said to me, “desperation is a man’s best friend”. Equally, Chris shared a similar view for his approach to investing in developing countries:

“Investing in people with the highest constraints produces the most innovation”.

9. No one perhaps graced the main stage with more ease and grace than the new Huffington Post CEO, Jared Grusd.

On talking about selling or writing to people:

“We ascribe these broad categories for those we deal with, e.g. our audience, consumers, buyers. Then we seem to treat them in a disconnected way to ourselves.

We first need to realise that we are all humans, and we can’t lose touch of that connection”.

10. What’s more, all humans have different moods and traits.

“Us humans don’t all behave the same or feel the same in any given day or week. We need to acknowledge that in our work in talking to others”.

11. So how do we create a good brand?

“You need to have a brand which resonates with human beings. To achieve that goal you need to stand for something.

This is the marriage of magic and math. How consumers consume, and how revenue flows are the math which all good companies need to know, but it’s the magic which will often set them apart”.

12. Ride the wave of opportunity.

Here’s how he sees the papers approach to new trends:

“Like a good surfer you need to see a wave coming, brace and ride with it”.

Note that all quotes are indirect.

13. What’s a great way to open a speech?

I loved it when Norm Johnston opened by saying:

“Thank you for spending these few minutes with me”

14. Both Jimmy Chamberlin and Gary Veynurchuk underlined the importance of hard work.

With the latter stating that:”It’s the 10% extra you do every day that makes you 100% better than everyone else”.

Equally, Gary V. eluded to how people don’t want to do the work. To be really good in a channel and make over $1 million in Snapchat you have to work hard.

As he said, on people’s pursuit for that silver bullet, or “do this” advice, “there is no algorithm for hard work”.

15. On wondering how to get off the ground with digital marketing, Kieran Flanagan of Hubspot rightly said, find out who your customers are and then see where they are most active.

Don’t try and go out on all channels and do them all half-hearted, especially given most people have limited resources. Do one or two channels really well.

16. As Gary V added:

“There’s a million ways how to do it. But the problem is there’s not a million ways for you to do it”.

“Build. Test. Learn. & Grow”.

17. On that path, be self-aware:

The fact most people say they want to be the next Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat etc. shows a lack of self awareness. Do they know the conditions and ingredients which made them what they were? Do they have that in themselves?

18. Help as opposed to sell to the consumer:

As Kieran Flanagan described, you need to create content people want to consume, like native content, which eases into their normal patterns as opposed to interrupting them.

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